Comments on: Syn-thesis 1 and Chris Pearson

By: WordPress: What Happened in 2010 | Valent Mustamin

WordPress: What Happened in 2010 | Valent Mustamin — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 03:11:55 +0000

[...] Thesis violating WordPress’ license I ended up in an impromptu conversation with Chris Pearson and Andrew Warner earlier today regarding the issue of Thesis violating WordPress’ license. http://ma.tt/2010/07/syn-thesis-1/ [...]

By: One of the Three Most Important People in WordPress - blog

One of the Three Most Important People in WordPress - blog — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:32:31 +0000

[...] For more, read Mullenweg’s blog. [...]

By: The WordPress GPL Timeline | WPCandy

The WordPress GPL Timeline | WPCandy — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:03:40 +0000

[...] http://ma.tt/2010/07/syn-thesis-1/ [...]

By: A Short History of Event Espresso and How GPL Compliance Has Helped My Business | Shoultes.net

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 07:54:56 +0000

[...] Recently Matt Mullenweg has been discussing the GPL license and how it benefits WordPress users, theme developers, plugin developers and programmers. In a recent post on his blog, Matt commented about how people were moving from the non-GPL compliant themes such as Thesis to GPL compliant like Woo, StudioPress, iThemes as a result of the Thesis license violation episode. [...]

By: Cutline Dropped On WordPress.com In Favor Of Coraline

Cutline Dropped On WordPress.com In Favor Of Coraline — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 19:50:00 +0000

[...] licensed setup. Chris also has another theme on WordPress.com called Press Row which according to this comment by Matt, will be seeing a similar fate. Keep in mind though that his comment was made during a heated time [...]

By: Syn-thesis 3: Switchers — Matt Mullenweg

Syn-thesis 3: Switchers — Matt Mullenweg — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:43:01 +0000

[...] biggest after-effect of the Thesis license violation episode seems to be raising people’s awareness of alternatives that are both fully GPL and have [...]

By: On the Thesis debacle | ParticleShock

On the Thesis debacle | ParticleShock — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 02:58:10 +0000

[...] See also: Jane’s post and Matt’s Interview link. [...]

By: Yet Another #thesiswp Post « BandonRandon Tech Blog

Yet Another #thesiswp Post « BandonRandon Tech Blog — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:11:39 +0000

[...] did it get there? Well Rick Beckman, a former Thesis developer, put it there as he explains on Matt’s blog post about the whole issue. Now with that information being true that clearly makes Thesis a derivative [...]

By: The Great Thesis Debate — particleshock

The Great Thesis Debate — particleshock — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:46:55 +0000

[...] also: Jane’s post and Matt’s Interview link. Filed Under: Asides Tagged With: GPL, Thesis, [...]

By: Crisis Averted: Thesis Submits To WordPress GPL | The Blog Herald

Crisis Averted: Thesis Submits To WordPress GPL | The Blog Herald — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 02:03:04 +0000

[...] Mullenweg (who admittedly is a huge fan of GPL himself) was not thrilled with Thesis’s GPL rebellion and offered Thesis fans a way to acquire a premium theme of their choice free of charge. As I said on Twitter, if there’s another premium theme you’d like to try out I’m happy to buy you a copy, just send a link and your info to my contact form. It’s better to choose a solid platform now rather than put it off until later. (Matt Mullenweg) [...]

By: WordPress, Thesis, et la licence GPL | WordPress Francophone

WordPress, Thesis, et la licence GPL | WordPress Francophone — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:30:00 +0000

[...] la synthèse de Matt (puis une seconde), avec des nombreux commentaires intéressants, notamment ceux de Rick Beckman, [...]

By: I Create, Distribute & Disseminate Cracked Software

I Create, Distribute & Disseminate Cracked Software — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:05:33 +0000

[...] [...]

By: Anup

Anup — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 06:39:53 +0000

Reading through all the variuos comments – I guess, apart from the wordpress.org forum, it is the documentation codex.wordpress.org that needs to be updated and popularized among the users.

The functionality of the themes depends on the way wordpress works. And different theme developers only exploit that in different ways – and to some extent some premium theme developers make it seem as if it is their theme that is doing all that.

By: Osborne

Osborne — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:58:06 +0000

Bravo!!!
Now we’re talking!!!

By: Trisha Cupra

Trisha Cupra — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 22:06:42 +0000

Matt, could you possibly add a page to the Codex with licensing guidelines for themes and plugins – especially premium ones? Something that outlines what you can and can’t do, split licenses, distribution, restricting running on concurrent websites, work for hire and so on? It would add so much clarity. The GPL isn’t exactly in ‘plain English’.

By: Adam Pieniazek

Adam Pieniazek — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:33:17 +0000

Let me know how it goes Christine, if you need any help feel free to email me via the contact form on my site.

The one possible hiccup is if you set a unique $table_prefix in your wp-config file (if so, just replace wp_ with that prefix).

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:07:43 +0000

With Paypal I believe it is 60 days… with credit cards depending on how you purchased there might be other options.

As far as I can see you have no license agreement visible up until the moment you get sent to Paypal which pretty much sucks.

By: Christine

Christine — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:55:14 +0000

Have installed Hybrid “behind the scenes” and will give the new tutorial a shot!

By: Mike Schinkel

Mike Schinkel — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:06:52 +0000

@Trica Cupra: I have often wondered about this, the fact that a stink has been made about themes that are not GPL but nobody has mentioned any of the encrypted commercial plugins. Frankly I’d just like to see clarity on the issue; right now it is a war of words that seem to be unequally applied.

By: Kat King

Kat King — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:49:38 +0000

Me, too, Jorge. I already asked for a refund for my Thesis dev license (see above) and they declined…even though they deceived me into purchase with their lack of transparency re their non-compliance with GPL (Hello, BBB?).

By: jorge Ledesma

jorge Ledesma — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:29:56 +0000

Yes tutorials on how to migrate away from Thesis would be cool, I have 500 plus post on Nokia Mobile Talk and the thought of tinkering with this just makes me shiver. I sure hope that more tutorials come out and to help us move away and into a gpl licensed theme. I would love to hear some recommendations on what themes are available to respect the code and are highly customizable.

So Matt are helping folks migrate to a new theme, if so I’d like to know how can I qualify, I freaking hate the fact that I got a Thesis Dev license $170 and now its going down the drain.

By: Christine

Christine — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:46:03 +0000

That sounds like a great idea! I’ve tried Hybrid in the past as well, and liked it a lot.

By: Christine

Christine — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:42:23 +0000

Oh my goodness! How did I not know this?! I’ve seriously seen tutorials where they do this with custom fields and, based on my Thesis experience, I assumed that’s how you were supposed to do it.

This brings up another gripe I’ve had with Thesis, and that’s that it’s put a stop to my actually learning to do things on my own, the right way. I’m 100% self-taught when it comes to HTML, CSS and (a little) PHP, and I want to learn tons more. I like poking around in the code, read tutorials and try new things by trial and error and I want to know how and why things work.

With Thesis, it’s complete voodoo to me. Yes, I’ve written dozens of custom functions to make it do what I tell it, but there’s no way to customize the loop at all (the closest you can get to it is hooking a custom query into the code preceding it), and there are lots of little things I see people doing out there that I can’t figure out how to incorporate into the way Thesis works. I’ve actually printed out most of the php files at one time or another just to study them and figure out what the heck they do. Real documentation is very hard to come by.

And, thanks again Bronson, for your offer to guide this lost little soul along. I will definitely take you up on it!

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:26:11 +0000

That’d be killer.

By: Adam Pieniazek

Adam Pieniazek — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:25:09 +0000

I put together a tutorial on how to move Thesis post meta values (SEO, thumbnail) into the Hybrid theme. Should be able to tweak it for other themes (I'd recommend putting in a test meta value to search for to find the name of that field in the database). If there's interest, I might put together a Thesis compatible child theme for Hybrid, where it'll automatically import any values like this into the new (GPL!) theme.